Ever notice how pharmaceutical ads targeting senior citizens always feature younger people with a little fake gray in their hair, who couldn’t possibly be over the age of 45?
TV commercials for elderly people suffering from erectile dysfunction and high cholesterol habitually show their subjects bicycling, lifting weights, hiking or getting ready to hop in bed with their spouses for some hot afternoon sex.
In short, the very kind of physical activities they’re least likely to engage in.
The same is true for tampon commercials, which show their target market swimming, doing yoga, bicycling and spending the night on the town. Often, while dressed completely in white.
There’s a reason for these knowing misrepresentations.
The trick to transforming people into sheeple is to identify the lies they desperately want to hear and then regurgitate those lies back to them. You find out what painful truths they’re in denial about and help them pretend they doesn’t exist.
Once a predatory con artist enables our comforting fictions we’ll hand over our checkbooks, billfolds, purses, the keys to our front doors, let them spend time alone with our kids, and even offer up unrestricted access to our private parts.
The only antidote is to embrace painful truths, like those habitually exposed in this column.
It doesn’t matter whether the person targeting you is a televangelist like Joel Osteen or a political hooker like Ted Cruz. The predatory con artists among us engage in this behavior because it allows them to enrich themselves at our expense.
That’s why both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who work and live in the world’s privilege bubbles, sold themselves to their supporters as the very thing they were not in the 2016 presidential race: representative leaders in a functioning democracy.
Look, if you’re over 80 it’s very unlikely you’re getting laid today. No matter what half-lies Trump and Big Pharma send your way. It doesn’t matter how many Viagra and Cialis pills you pop or how many countries he bombs from afar.
Ain’t happening.
You don’t have E.D. You have old age.
Your penis stopped working because you’ve succeeded in living so long that your parts are wearing out.
Remember?
This is not a tragedy.
You’re also not going to travel far from home, because you need to be close to the toilet.
Remember?
And your handle on our rapidly changing world is not what it once was. That’s why you fell for this con artist.
It’s not because you’re strong and smart. It’s because you’re weak and fearful and easily manipulated on that basis. Which is why con artists target the elderly.
Meanwhile, Hillary was pushing the twin lies that straight white men are inherently evil and rich people can help the needy without ever getting their hands dirty.
That makes about as much sense as wearing white when you’re menstruating. Unless you want the world to know you live in denial.
In Hillary’s limousine liberal construct, women, gays, blacks and Hispanics all fought and won their freedoms through armed insurrection in the street. Not with the enthusiastic support of progressive white men like James Zwerg, John Brown, John Stoltenberg, Abraham Lincoln. FDR and Lyndon Johnson.
In her world, we don’t help a needy person by giving them a place to stay in our homes, or a plate of our soup, or a job beside us. Instead, we outsource it while wearing a $14,000 couture smock.
Same goes for our elderly parents.
We don’t wipe their bottoms when they mess themselves, as they once did for us. No, we outsource that job by stockpiling them in nursing homes and “assisted adult communities” so we can remain stylishly clean.
News Flash: Americans are not entitled to the best of everything, no matter what charlatans like Hillary and The Donald tell us. We are not a superior lifeform on a par with the Aryan Super Race of the Third Reich. We’re just human being like everybody else.
Convincing us otherwise is how the professional grifters among us make their dreams come true. Not ours.
Know what else?
We all have to “settle” at some point to be part of a successful relationship, no matter what Oprah says. It’s either that or grow old alone because relationships are about compromise. Not winning at the expense of your partner.
That’s why I routinely fake my orgasms to keep my gullible mate happy. It’s amazing what a strategic loogie can accomplish in the dark when directed at a willing mind.
(blank stare)
Not.
Guess what else?
We don’t live in a functioning democracy any more. And the United States is no longer the leader of the free world. We are the villainous tool of a global corporate empire.
Ain’t no way to “Make America Great Again” by bullying other countries into placing U.S. corporate profits ahead of their people, as they’ve been placed ahead of our people. The correct phrase for that behavior is tyranny.
Remember?
You know that famous description of Goldman Sachs as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Well, it’s a fairly accurate description of the United States of America now and our global corporate empire, which places profit growth ahead of people.
Our elites have begun channeling the Third Reich, but with different scapegoats. The self-described “Masters of the Universe” on Wall Street have substituted Muslim Americans and illegal immigrants for the Jews, gays, gypsies and the disabled once targeted by their predecessors in the self-described “Master Race.”
Why are the big investment banks that control our elected officials targeting the Muslim world?
It sure as hell isn’t because of the Saudi-financed attacks of 9/11. It’s because Islam is the only one of the which is still serious about its prohibitions against usury. The practice of lending money at exorbitant rates is the nutsack of big bank profits and power.
Trump is a tool of these banks. During the election, he was pushing the intellectual heroin that a fearful white person unhinged by the current breakneck pace of change actually has a handle on some kind of inherent truth. Namely, that their tribe represents the evolutionary pinnacle of the human race.
It’s pure nonsense.
The painful truth is that race is a social construct. There is no set level of melanin at which a person becomes white, red, black or yellow. It’s all just perception, driven by primitive tribal instincts.
Meanwhile, Hillary was peddling the intellectual nose candy that those who think all change is good, blindly champion traditional victim groups, and substitute higher education for life experience represent the pinnacle of human evolution.
Both her ideas and those of her adversary were knowing lies, grounded in serious sins of omission. As is the notion we still have real elections in this country.
Our elections feature dueling Wall Street salespeople. Just like the German elections after the Nazis seized power, which featured Nazi candidates and their non-party “guests.”
Free elections?
No.
More like Kabuki Theater, professional wrestling or so-called Reality TV.
At the heart of these fictions is the primitive divide-and-conquer tribalism of a Predatory 1 Percent which maintains its rule by pitting one half of the masses against the other.
This is the same idiocy which convinced our forebears that droughts and hurricanes occurred because the Gods were displeased. They required human sacrifice, or animal sacrifice, or financial sacrifice. Preferably by someone else.
Know what else is idiotic?
The idea that some rich kid who wants benefits without burdens is actually helping anyone but themselves when they “champion” the poor and downtrodden to assuage their own guilt.
A guilt rooted entirely in the painful truth that they did not deserve to be born into splendor.
No one does.
What does a sheltered rich kid know about stretching $1,000 to cover a month’s worth of living expenses, navigating the government bureaucracy to secure food stamps or public housing or healthcare, or walking the streets of a rough neighborhood without getting jumped?
Not a goddamn thing.
That’s precisely why the talking heads on the various news shows never seem to include anyone making less than $200,000 a year. Normal people simply cannot be allowed to speak for themselves in our Brave New World, lest they begin to spout painful truths.
Instead, they must be spoken for by rich surrogates, like Rachel Maddow, Bill O’Reilly, Van Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Al Sharpton, and John Oliver.
Our current downward spiral all comes down to the limitations of the woeful generation of toxic elites who now lead us. This group of sheltered fools has no impulse control, views excess as a blessing, and is incapable of either asking or answering one very simple question.
“How much is too much?”
They’re driven by fear rather than courage, and weakness rather than strength. So much so that they completely undermined the freedoms which made America great after 9/11, eradicating them with such frantic momentum that it was like they never existed.
Today’s America is ruled by frightened corporate and political elites who live behind walls and security guards. They have no fellow feeling for the poor and faltering middle class.
Why?
Mostly because they’ve fucked us over for decades and are deathly afraid we’re finally figuring it out.
Their deepest fear is that once we identify the system of economic apartheid they’ve been erecting since 9/11 we’ll embark on a murderous rampage. Like the Russians peasants of 1917, the French peasants of 1789, the New York Draft Riots of 1963, the Khmer Rouge of 1975, or the LA Riots of 1992.
The Predatory 1 Percent (P1P) can feel it coming. We all can, once we filter out the nonsense emanating from our fake leaders and their lie machines.
That’s why both Democrats and Republicans repressed the peaceful demonstrators of Occupy Wall Street so harshly in 2010-2012, and rigged the Democratic primary to torpedo Bernie Sanders.
The P1P is terrified their fellow Americans are going to bash-in the doors of their country clubs, scale the walls of their elite prep schools, and stain the streets red in their rich enclaves before they can hop a jet out of Dodge. As the Saudi royals living in the U.S. did after 9/11.
They’re racing the clock right now. Trying to get automated law enforcement online before our weary police and military turn on them.
They need drones and lots of them. Quick, fast and in a hurry.
And lots and lots of computer surveillance.
Why?
Because the proverbial snowball is rolling downhill and it’s getting bigger and faster with each passing day. Revolution is in the wind, and not the kind of peaceful change at the polls which Americans reveled in back in the days of real electoral choices, real democracy and representative leadership.
Meanwhile, the useful idiots who voted for Trump are dying off and the Internet is tying the rest of us together in a World Wide Hive Mind.
The World Wide Web represents a clear and present danger to the beneficiaries of the status quo. Along the lines of the advent of the printing press and the industrial revolution.
This Global Hive Mind is enabling the masses to see there really is no difference between the faltering middle class here in the U.S. and the oppressed workers of the rest of the world. We all want the same things: the love of a good partner, a cold beer on a hot day, affordable housing, decent food, good schools, and a future for our kids beyond debt slavery.
The Global Hive Mind is exposing the Predatory 1 Percent who stand between us and those modest goals. And revealing the one painful truth which stands above all others for the faltering middle class.
It’s us or them now, and they made it that way with their wanton greed and self serving myths of inherent superiority.
